Interactive translation and dialogue systems are computer systems that converse with human users or enable conversations between human users. Such systems may be monolingual in that a “conversation” occurs between the system and a human user (e.g., a telephone-based dialogue system that provides airline flight information responsive to user commands). Such systems may also be bilingual in that the “conversation” occurs between two human users who speak different languages (in this case, the dialogue system also performs translation between languages). Although the accuracy of interactive translation and dialogue systems is improving, they may still suffer from errors and inaccuracies.
For example, both monolingual and bilingual systems may have trouble understanding a user input. One common instance of this is when a user wants to use a word that is currently unknown to the system (e.g., the user uses the term “Madras” for a location that the system knows as “Chennai”). Another common and unexpected behavior is the inability of the system to recognize a word in a user input that was included in a previous system output. For example, a first speaker using a bilingual system may say something in Spanish that gets translated into English as “the water is murky.” A second speaker may then say in English, “how long has it been murky?” However, the system may recognize the word “murky” in the second speaker's input as “marquis,” “thirty,” or some other incorrect word, despite having just output the word “murky” in accordance with the translation of the first speaker's input.